Grove 98 Has Ten New Restaurants. Only One Wants You to Stay for a Drink.

If you live in Wexford Reserve, you have watched Grove 98 grow for five years now. First it was framing lumber and a Wegmans sign that seemed to sit there for months. Then it was Torchy's Tacos and CAVA opening in quick succession. Then Dave's Hot Chicken, then Five Guys, then a nail spa and a med spa and a recovery studio, one storefront at a time, until the whole stretch of Highway 98 near Ligon Mill Road started to feel less like a shopping center and more like a small town's second downtown.

Count up every named restaurant and coffee shop that has opened there since Wegmans arrived in May 2021, and you get ten: Torchy's Tacos, Nothing Bundt Cakes, CAVA, Whataburger, Dave's Hot Chicken, Chopt Creative Salad Co, Five Guys, Piada Italian Street Food, BIBIBOP Asian Grill, and Summer Moon Coffee. Ten brands, and every one of them is counter-service. You order at a register or a kiosk, your name gets called, you eat with a fork you picked up yourself.

That is about to change. Firebirds Wood Fired Grill is targeting an opening by the end of September, and it is not another quick-service arrival. It is Grove 98's first sit-down restaurant with a bar program, and if you have been waiting for a reason to walk over instead of drive past, this is it.

What ten counter-service openings actually tell you

Grove 98 was never marketed as a food court. Justin Siemens, president of Stiles Carolinas, the Fort Lauderdale-based developer behind the project, said the goal from the start was to build "an exceptional, walkable community that offers a blend of quality retail, restaurant and services." By that measure, the project has delivered. The Northwest Quadrant reached full lease-up with Sleep Number, Torchy's Tacos, Nothing Bundt Cakes, One Medical, CAVA, and Ideal Dental, with Whataburger following on the outparcel. Wake County's first Whataburger opened near Wegmans on March 26, 2026, a fact confirmed by WRAL's restaurant desk that same week.

The second retail phase followed the same pattern. When Stiles announced the final tenant lineup for Phase 2's 24,281 square feet, the roster was Dave's Hot Chicken, Chopt Creative Salad Co, Five Guys, Piada Italian Street Food, BIBIBOP Asian Grill, VIO Med Spa, Summer Moon Coffee, Sweathouz, and SEN Nail Spa. That phase reached 100 percent leased and was later sold to an institutional investor, a sign the retail portion of Grove 98 is essentially built out and stabilized.

Here is the pattern worth naming: every food tenant that has opened across both phases is fast casual. Every non-food tenant is a service business built around a quick visit: a fitting, a nail appointment, a recovery session, a dental exam. Nothing so far has asked you to make a reservation or plan an evening around it.

That is not a criticism of the mix. Fast-casual and service tenants lease faster, build out faster, and start generating rent sooner, which is exactly what a developer wants while a project is still filling in around a grocery anchor. It is simply useful to notice, because it means the "restaurant boom" headlines around Grove 98 have described something narrower than they suggest. You could eat well there for five years without ever needing a reservation.

What Firebirds is actually bringing

Firebirds will occupy space in the development and, per the Wake Forest Business & Industry Partnership's own announcement, is expected to open by the end of September as the brand's 74th location nationally. The details in that announcement read differently from everything else on the tenant list. Reservations are recommended. The dress code is smart casual. There is a dedicated bar area called the FIREBAR with a happy hour running Monday through Friday, and the signature drink is a Double Black Diamond Martini poured tableside. The company built its concept around wood-fired steaks and seafood cooked over locally sourced hardwoods, with a scratch kitchen behind it rather than a heat lamp.

Firebirds also described a hospitality training program where staff taste the menu themselves and rotate through different parts of the kitchen before working the floor, the kind of investment a business makes when it expects guests to stay for more than fifteen minutes. None of that shows up in a Torchy's or a Dave's Hot Chicken, not because those brands do it worse, but because that is not what a counter-service format is built to deliver.

If you have hosted out-of-town guests and wanted somewhere sit-down within Grove 98 itself, you have not had that option. By the end of this month, you will.

Why this matters if you already live here

Wexford Reserve sits close enough to downtown Wake Forest and the Highway 98 corridor that Grove 98 functions as a practical extension of the neighborhood rather than a separate errand. The last five years turned that stretch of road into a place you go for a fast lunch, a haircut, or a Wegmans run. What has been missing is a reason to go there for an evening.

That gap closing lines up with something else on the calendar this month. Wake Forest's final 2026 Concerts in the Park at E. Carroll Joyner Park wraps up September 13, with the Raleigh-based cover band The Band Next Door headlining, and Good Neighbor Day follows at the same park on September 19. Between the concert series ending and Firebirds opening days apart from each other, this is the point in the year where Wake Forest's outdoor summer programming hands off to whatever comes next, and Grove 98 is picking up part of that handoff with its first real dinner option.

None of this changes what Grove 98 is. It is still a grocery-anchored mixed-use center built around fast turnover and quick visits, and that model has clearly worked. What changes is what you can do there. A development that spent five years proving it could fill storefronts quickly is now testing whether it can hold a table.

A few direct questions

Is Firebirds definitely opening by the end of September? That is the target date the company and the Wake Forest Business & Industry Partnership have both stated publicly. Restaurant openings can slip by a few weeks for reasons as ordinary as equipment delivery or staffing, so treat late September as the intended window rather than a guarantee.

Does Grove 98 have other sit-down restaurants planned? Nothing has been announced beyond Firebirds as of this writing. Given how quickly the retail phases filled with fast-casual tenants, it would not be surprising to see another full-service concept follow, but there is no confirmed name yet.

Is this relevant if I'm not currently near Grove 98? If you live in Wexford Reserve or nearby, the corridor is close enough that it already functions as your extended neighborhood rather than a separate drive, and this is the first month it offers a real dinner-out option instead of a lunch stop.

If you already live in Wexford Reserve, none of this requires you to do anything. It just means the next few weeks near home look a little different than the last five years did. And if you are the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood by watching what actually opens there, rather than what a brochure promised, that is exactly the instinct we build our work around at Key Realty Team. Whenever you are ready to talk about what a market like this one means for your own plans, we would be glad to help you unlock your real estate dreams.